thanks to Admin for granting my request to launch a K9-chapter here on CQB-Team ! Being a K9 officer (handler as well as decoy and instructor), I'm always interested in learning about K9 deployment and tactical use of police/military K9's.

Here in Belgium, we let our K9's sniff at the door from the outside before we enter the room. At this point, the dog is supposed to indicate us the presence of a person in the room we're about to enter (body language or barking for non-tactical teams). Belgian laws says we need to keep our dogs on leash all the time, but actually we'd prefer to send in the dog before we enter. I have a video of a French friend of mine, who sadly passed away last year. Nevertheless, he was a brilliant K9 trainer, as you will see in this video :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqyWqfpvPs This gives you an idea on how we train our police K9's ...

So once you know it's a "hot room" - suspect inside - due to the dogs demonstration, would you change your entry to suit that room; in a deliberate way?
Also, if the dog goes in first does that automatically change to dynamic and do you follow it all the way to the suspect or do you wait a few seconds until you visually or audibly confirm it's got the suspect? And then how do you take-down your suspect with multiple armed officers crowding the room and a dog and suspect probably struggling in there too?

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Ryan wrote:So once you know it's a "hot room" - suspect inside - due to the dogs demonstration, would you change your entry to suit that room; in a deliberate way?
Also, if the dog goes in first does that automatically change to dynamic and do you follow it all the way to the suspect or do you wait a few seconds until you visually or audibly confirm it's got the suspect? And then how do you take-down your suspect with multiple armed officers crowding the room and a dog and suspect probably struggling in there too?

Hello Ryan,

normally, this kind of K9 is supposed to be trained in circumstances where there are several "operators" on the scene, so that the dog is used to stay focussed on his target. Besides that, if the K9 handler knows his dog, he exactly knows what to expect when he enters the room. His primary concern should be his focus on the dog, without losing sight of his proper security and cover offcourse. All other operators enter the room, providing cover and backup, but the dog shoud ignore these colleagues and stay focused on his target (-s). Having said that, this also means that these dogs are to be trained as such : staying focused on target while police officers move around and even struggle with the offender. If such training is not provided, accidents on the scene WILL DEFINITELY happen ! You have my word for that

I can confirm your words. We had almost accident, when we started to train with K9, training with all group is necessary. We use malinois,have one attack/drug and another one search and rescue. Great help on perimeter or vehicles busts.